The Unknown Cenotaph

The unknown cenotaph: Private origins of a public monument Dr David Faber 2015 1 Table of contents I. Preface II. Illustrations III. Remembrance of things past IV. Australian Nativism & the Dardanelles cenotaph V. The Outbreak of the Great War & The Advertiser VI. SA Nativism & the Australian Wattle Day League VII. Walter Torode Master Builder VIII. À plan so patriotic’ IX. Ìt is sweet and seemly to die for one’s country’ 2 I Preface This publication has like most of my work had a long gestation. As a freelance historian for much of my career, no institutional obligation has obliged me to be one of the publish or perish brigade, who are rushed into print only to repent at leisure. My engagement with the Anzac legend began in infancy when a favourite Liberal voting uncle handed me a venerable comic strip apology for the Gallipoli landing. It taught me that my people had been engaged in things larger than themselves. It was in effect my Iliad. This was in the 1960s, when Australia and indeed my relations were split by the War in Vietnam. My great grandparents had been Methodist opponents of the Boer War. My Labor voting grandmother and father opposed Australia’s involvement in Vietnam, and were very concerned for a conscripted cousin who did a tour of duty there. At the age of eight I wanted to march in the Moratorium demonstration in Burnie, Tasmania, using the credibility of my Cub Scout uniform. Dad talked me out of it, fearing political surveillance and damage to my future job prospects; as Lenny Bruce said around then, if you’re not paranoid, you’re not paying attention. That year we got television, largely for my education, and I watched the Tet Offensive in the living room. I learned that modern heroes fought on their bellies, not standing up as in olden times. At that age I was still playing soldiers and reading about the British Empire. I was early implicitly aware of conflicting traditions and social and political cross currents. In 1994 I took up residence on Adelaide’s South Terrace. Fascinated with history since the age of five, I have always taken an interest in public monuments, not least those dubbed by Professor Ken Inglis our `sacred places’ of the national cult of military commemoration. Across from my digs was a cenotaph, almost directly in front of what was then still Trades Hall. It had been a gathering point for open air union stop work meetings. A moment’s inspection established that this cenotaph was indeed of very early date. 3 As my enquiries broadened, the identity of the builder emerged and that of the organisation which commissioned the work, plus that of the conservative newspaper editor who publicised the initiative and that of the Governor General commemorated on the plaque, the chief imperial national recruiting officer. The physical features of the monument embodied the grieving of a community enduring an Iliad, shocked by the unprecedented human cost of the clash of arms in its first Great War. These findings were written up in a research report, here laid before the historical public on the occasion of the centenary year of the Anzac landing and the erection of the cenotaph. In the intervening period it became apparent that this report was too long to be published as an article and too short to be published as a book. Yet the backstory laid out here in the table of contents below seemed to require integral retelling at some little length. Hence its appearance now as a booklet. It is hoped readers will agree that this form suits a story worth telling, the story of how a young nation worked itself up to participate in a great imperial adventure, and to commemorate, during its very involvement, the terrible price paid in the hope of the resumption of a just peace with honour. So began a democratic tradition of commemorating every person fallen in military service, and even every person who served at more provincial localities like Penguin on the North West Coast of Tasmania. It should never be forgotten, though it is sometimes implicitly overlooked by an officialdom which is forced to implicitly acknowledge it by emphasising Anzac bravery, that the Gallipoli landing was a military debacle, poorly planned and badly executed. It ought to be a historical warning not to be `hell bent’, to use the phrase of Douglas Newton, on involvement in imperial adventures. I subscribe to the Honest History school of historians whose belief it is that the Anzac tradition is but one albeit important strand of Australian history, which must be analysed in a balanced way if it is not to degenerate into a militaristic recruiting myth for a sub-imperial nation which sometimes raises troops generation after generation by methods similar to the ocker sale of breakfast cereal. There was a public outcry when a grocery oligopoly put its logo to a poster and website celebrating the Anzac legend.1 The risk of conservative and commercial political exploitation of the tradition is always there, never more than in recent times with the revival of Anzac observance at a time of divisive foreign military entanglements. As early as 1928 the dissident Communist Party of Australia 4 was to complain by publishing a letter from À Class-Conscious Digger’ of what the distinguished historian Humphrey McQueen was later to christen ÀNZAC-ery’.2 The notion that the nation was somehow born at Anzac Cove was always propagandistic, issuing as it did from the politically interested mouth of the demagogue Billy Hughes in 1919. As if the preceding century and more of colonial history, preceded by millennia of first nations’ settlement, had left no mark upon us. And the spectacle of the bravery of the Anzac generation being once again romanticised to sell newspapers in this centenary year is disturbing.3 Speaking of newspapers, specifically The Advertiser and The Register, a further structural word is warranted on this paper’s coverage of their coverage of the outbreak of the Great War and the inauguration of the Dardanelles Cenotaph respectively. A precis of this paper was published by Honest History under the editorial hand of colleague David Stephen. When published I was startled to find the checked quotations referred to The Advertiser, which I had somewhat overlooked, rather than The Register, whose editor had been a central figure in the selling of the memorial to the public. I considered revising that section of this paper and researched so doing, but found that except for minor details the two accounts were very substantially corroborative. Had I accommodated these variorum readings of the inauguration I felt that I would need to write another section to be entitled Òn Wattle Day Eve’ on how the war had been covered in early September 1915 by the Adelaide press to define what was in the minds of those who participated in the inauguration. I found during this exercise that the question of how the outbreak of war had been covered needed to be canvassed. Aware of the tendency for the bulk of the paper to grow under my hand and its already long gestation, I decided to analyse one rendition of one topic for each newspaper. Readers of the contemporary Adelaide press may of course have read both newspapers simultaneously. Perhaps I or another writer will return to a less selective analysis in the future. The upshot was the finding that press coverage could not account for the deep motivation of community response to the July Crisis, which responded to underlying culture decades in the preparation by State and establishment. The opportunity for a constructively critical reading of the Australian popular military tradition of volunteer, conscript and professional service should be seized and must 5 be seized during the centenary years of the Great War to prevent vested interests further militarising our society for their own anti-democratic ends. In focusing in detail on one nationally significant South Australian moment of our complex national cult of commemoration, this study hopes to contribute to that end. But if as a proud child of the protesting 1960s and 70s and an anti-conscriptionist I reject militarism, I equally reject scorning a tradition of a democracy armed by volunteers mobilised against imperialism and fascism. To do so would be wrong and impolitic self-isolation from popular tradition. I have a number of intellectual debts to repay which underscore the approach taken in this work. The first is to Bill Gammage, under whom I had the privilege of studying Australian history at the University of Adelaide as an undergraduate in 1981. His famous The Broken Years taught me that the Anzac tradition could be approached respectfully in a properly humanistic way rather than as an exercise in jingoism. Patsy Adam-Smith’s The Anzacs is likewise valuable. Reynolds & Lake’s provocative What’s Wrong With Anzac? was a wake-up call after my own heart, for all its arguable limitations. Two British works have structured my over-arching approach to the Dardanelles Cenotaph as a monument to the history and politics of commemoration. They are Jay Winter’s Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning and Alex King’s Memorials of the Great War in Britain. Both emphasise the complexity of this civic cult. King in particular emphasises the local politics which shaped each memorial, as I have done here. My general approach of historical materialism has been shaped by the Oxford Anglican historical idealist Robin George Collingwood, a civilian survivor of the Great War at that ancient academy, and the socialists Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci.

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